It was a very special week this week for a number of reasons. First, we revealed the results of our School Council elections. After much discussion within Form Groups about what makes a good councillor, pupils from each Form Group put their names forward to be the School Council representative for their Year Group. I’m therefore very pleased to be able to announce our new School Council for 2019-20:

Year 7:

• Leshay
• Maddison

Year 8:

• Jaydon
• Millie

Year 9:

• Kaleem
• Lilly

Year 10:

• Liam
• Daisy

Year 11:

• Phillip
• Kaneez

Well done to all of you and I’m really looking forward to seeing what we achieve together through the School Council.

Another round of elections also took place this week, this time to elect our new Head Boy and Head Girl. There was a rigorous selection process for our Year 11 pupils hoping to be elected. In our Key Stage 4 assemblies over the last two weeks, candidates have delivered their speeches to the peers, seeking to persuade them that they should be the new Head Boy or Girl. Just to get up in front of the rest of Key Stage 4 and deliver a speech was an incredible achievement in itself, but I was also astounded by the quality of the speeches and maturity with which each individual approached the task. It was clear they all took the responsibility of Head Boy or Girl very seriously indeed. As impressive as each candidate was, there were ultimately only two positions to be filled and following a vote by the rest of the Year 11 pupils, I’m pleased to announce that this year’s Head Boy and Head Girl are Joshua and Donna. Congratulations to both of you, I know you’ll both be outstanding role models for the whole school.

This week our Key Stage 4 Digit4ll pathway would like to introduce themselves..

On a Monday in our Learning for Life session, we usually have breakfast served to us by each other in a café style way. We take it in turns to make and serve each other breakfast whilst the others chat and catch up about their weekend.

We started our week this week by having a catch up with Mr. Bright about our weekend. We found out that Edward made “Coq Au Vin” with his Dad at weekend, that Brendon did what he always does (“chilled”) and that Jack did his usual of helping out his cousins’ football team.

This week, on our Pathway day, we had a focus around Health and Safety concerns when using ICT. We watched some videos about staying safe in the workplace, and discussed how we meet legal requirements in school with Health and Safety and ICT. Jarif’s work reflects the discussion we had around this and he used Keynote on his iPad to create this..

We also looked at Health and Safety concerns with using our iPads specifically. Below is Edward’s work discussing screen time, radiation and repetitive strain injury.

Shaan’s work shows this discussion in his own way:

We also looked at the Young Person’s Acceptable Use Agreement and explained what we do in our everyday lives to meet these rules within school. Musa and Jack’s work shows the agreement and the points that they feel they achieve in their day to day life at New Bridge..

Mr. Orme and Miss McWhirter are always very helpful and are on hand with Mrs. Grogan to give us any guidance we need..

Macauley had a great morning of playing basketball at the Ball Hall!

All of our work is going towards our ICT qualification with WJEC, which we are working on towards Entry 3 and Level 1 within the class. We have a had a very successful start to the term which we hope continues throughout the year!

Mr Bright. our IT Advisor, has an update for us on our new iPad Champions..

As we roll out our 1:1 iPad initiative across the MAT, New Bridge School and the Learning Centre have both identified some of their ‘iPad Champions’ who are also leading the TV channels at their site. Each site has multiple screens that broadcast some of the successes happening within lessons, around school and on school trips. The TV channel also communicates messages, dates of events and showcases pupils’ work. All this content is created and uploaded by our ‘iPad Champions’.

Here we can see Jack doing his daily job of checking the screens are broadcasting content..

Edward, Pradeep and Philip are using Keynote to create messages, iMovie to edit videos and Showbie to transfer files..

We are starting to see the potential of mobile device technology within the classroom but I know this is only the beginning. I am very excited to see where this goes as we get more involved and it is fully embedded across the MAT.

Now over to Ms Wilson, our Creative Arts Advisor, for news of some special visitors..

This week, we were lucky to have 2 musicians from Live Music Now coming to perform to a number of our young people from the Interactive Bases and Communication Groups. Edward Robinson and Rachel Fright performed a number of songs using the voice and piano and the pupils were left feeling very calm and relaxed. There were also opportunities to participate with clapping rhythms and creating a soundscape for a piece of music about a rain storm.

These concerts are invaluable in introducing the pupils to different types of music and professional musicians who are at the top of their game. Live Music Now will be running a project with some of our pupils after Christmas and we look forward to having them in New Bridge School for a longer term project.

AB3 have been enjoying some Halloween fun – they carved a pumpkin and made dancing ghosts in Science using bicarb of soda and vinegar to blow up the balloons!

[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”212″ gal_title=”AB3 Halloween 2019″]

Finally, we had our very own New Bridge wedding on Friday. For those of you who don’t know, our wonderful Ms Hall and our excellent Mr Birch are to be wed over the half term holidays. Clearly we wouldn’t be able to pack all of our New Bridge pupils and staff into a tiny chapel so we took it upon ourselves to host a little wedding ceremony of our own in front of a jam packed theatre on Friday afternoon. I’m pretty sure I’ve not been ordained to officiate a wedding and I’m quite confident Haribo rings don’t count either, so whilst they’ll need to wait until next week to truly tie the knot, we were all extremely pleased to play a little part in helping them to celebrate their big day. From all of us at New Bridge, we hope you both enjoy every minute of it and we look forward to seeing Mr Hall and Mrs Birch-Hall on your return.

In the meantime, it’s holidays for us all. Wishing you a wonderful week off. Stay safe, have fun, and see you when we get back.

Gavin

Click here for this week’s news from Graham

You can find Dawn’s blog for the Learning Centre here

For news on our Key Stage 5 pathway groups at Medtia Square please click here

You can find my previous blog posts here